Source record

Published by martinfowler.com (Exploring Gen AI series, incl. Böckeler) (T1 source). The original is at https://martinfowler.com/articles/orchestrator-tax.html.

Pipeline notes

The summary and note below are generated by the signal pipeline — they are Beyond Desk’s reading, not quotations from the source.

Argues that subagents in multi-agent AI workflows should be used to protect the orchestrator's working memory from context bloat, not merely to save time or parallelize. Calls for explicit ground rules on when and how to delegate.

Reframes subagent delegation as a working-memory discipline rather than a throughput trick, grounded in a named engineer's real session rather than generic agent-design hype.

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